<sidenote>

For those that don’t know about it, binfmt_misc can help a LOT in some/many 
cases when cross-compiling for Xeon Phi. For instance, compiling HDF5 for Xeon 
Phi without it is a pain (or used to be, I don’t know if HDF5 now explicitly 
supports it). But with binfmt_misc it is as easy as for regular x86_64.

binfmt_misc is a linux feature that checks for fingerprints in executable 
files, and if the fingerprint matches one of the registered entries, then one 
script is executed instead of the binary file. You can use for transparently 
executing java programs without prepending “java”, to do the same with windows 
binaries without prepending “wine”, or in this case to use a script to execute 
a Xeon Phi binary in a local or remote Xeon Phi. If the local host and the Xeon 
Phi share a file system, the script is particularly easy. Many checks done by 
configure scripts and/or make files (hdf5 for instance generates a binary that 
builds a configuration file that is used during the make) are transparently 
done this way without the cross-compilation getting in your way.

</sidenote>

On 01/06/16 03:45, "[email protected] on behalf of Christopher 
Samuel" <[email protected] on behalf of [email protected]> 
wrote:

>On 31/05/16 21:38, Adrian Rodriguez Vilas wrote:
>
>> It's interesting having this option knowing that most of the compilations for
>> the Phi will need extra work?
>
>To be honest I'm not too surprised, it's pretty much the same situation
>as BlueGene/Q where you cannot run binaries built for the host on the
>compute nodes as the kernel there checks for a special ELF "note" header
>that the IBM patched GNU toolchain adds in. :-/
>
>BlueGene/P didn't have that issue which made some cross compilation
>tasks easier to deal with.
>
>All the best,
>Chris
>--
> Christopher Samuel        Senior Systems Administrator
> VLSCI - Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative
> Email: [email protected] Phone: +61 (0)3 903 55545
> http://www.vlsci.org.au/      http://twitter.com/vlsci



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